The present invention relates generally to communication networks, and more particularly, to methods and systems for determining the geographical location of a host in a public network, such as the Internet.
Presently, there are few tools that purportedly determine geographical locations of hosts, such as servers, routers, or any other processor with an identifiable network address in the Internet. One such tool is NetGeo, which is available through Cooperative Association of Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) and may be accessed on-line at www.caida.org. These tools typically determine the geographical locations of hosts by parsing their associated whois records. To retrieve a whois record for a host, these tools invoke a whois command, which returns a record including a postal address of the entity to which the host belongs.
Most existing tools, such as NetGeo may provide reliable geographical information for some hosts, such as Internet routers, but fail to provide reliable geographical information for all hosts in the Internet. For example, although a whois record includes the postal address of the entity to which a host belongs, this postal address may not be the actual location of the host, especially if the host belongs to a large business, corporation, or an international Internet Service Provider (ISP). For such hosts, the whois record typically includes the registered postal address of the entity managing or controlling a host, which is likely to be the business address of the entity's headquarters and not the actual location of the host. Accordingly, the registered postal addresses in whois records are unlikely to be the actual addresses of such hosts.
However, if an entity is a small business or a university, then it is likely that the host in question may be located at the registered postal address in the associated whois record for that host. For example, “whois -h rs.internic.net monmouth.com” returns a record that includes an address registered in the “rs.internic.net” database for a second level domain name “monmouth.com.” If the domain name monmouth.com belongs to a small local business, it may be inferred that a host with a name, such as “shell.monmouth.com” is located in the county of Monmouth in the state of New Jersey.
Accordingly, although most existing tools may provide reliable geographical information about hosts belonging to small entities or universities, these tools cannot provide reliable geographical information for most hosts, especially if the hosts are managed or controlled by large organizations, corporations, or international Internet Service Providers (ISPs).